Paid search
Combining SEO and Ads: greater returns from both channels
The likelihood of a potential customer becoming a customer after visiting a website just once is small. This happens less often than when visitors have multiple contact moments with the website before becoming customers. These contact moments can arise because you are active on multiple channels. For example, someone may first arrive at a blog via the organic search results and, at a later point, the same person clicks on your advert and becomes a customer.
How does this work in practice? If you want to work with both channels, you need to do so in a way that is proportionally more profitable than working with just one channel. The result ‘more sales’ or ‘more revenue’ means nothing if total costs have risen much faster in proportion. That is why this practical example shows how to make the two channels work together optimally.
Deploying the channels strategically for the best ROI
To do this, you first analyse each channel separately. When expressing costs in monetary terms, advertising is often easier to map out than search engine optimisation, because the latter often also involves an investment of time.
When it comes to advertising, you can clearly see what the strategy has delivered in the end. You can see which product groups or landing pages generate the best conversion rate and also know what costs are associated with them.
Another commonly used measurement tool for obtaining an indication of performance is cost per click, known in English as CPC (cost-per-click). You can also apply this model for determining how much a visitor costs to SEO, with some work. Unfortunately, it is not ‘perfect’, but it does provide insights that you would not otherwise have had. It also helps determine your SEO and Ads strategy.
Mapping out SEO-CPC
Whereas with advertising you can often produce a report in no time, calculating SEO-CPC requires a few more steps.
With search engine optimisation, you can make a year-on-year comparison and look at visitors and revenue, among other things. Whereas Ads-CPC concerns the cost per click, this translates into cost per session for SEO, so that you can also compare it with Ads.
SEO is, simply put, made up of three pillars: technical aspects, on-page adjustments and building authority. You can attach a price to the things done internally: X hours multiplied by a certain amount. Or, if one person or a team is working on it, you can simply use the salary. For anything you outsource, you can map out the annual amount of the invoices, and the same applies to any software. You now have a rough estimate of the total SEO costs.
Ideally, you also allocate a portion to the focus categories to which you devoted the most attention that year. This provides a fairer picture, because that is where most of the resources went.
Simply put: 1/3 you allocate, for example, to the homepage and ‘other’, and 2/3 you distribute across your focus categories and underlying pages. Naturally, having a more precise overview is better, but this analysis is not an end in itself either.
Ultimately, you arrive at a table with your URL in one column and your allocated costs in the second. If you add a third column with the calculated difference in visitors compared with a year earlier, you can ultimately calculate the SEO-CPC. You divide the amount by the additional visitors and then you have the CPC per session. You can subsequently convert this into a percentage and also have the budget ratios.
Is this analysis entirely fair? No, because if you had done nothing, you might have had less traffic. So you would also want to include that difference, but then you are working with assumptions again. This analysis is purely intended to gain a relative insight within the SEO activities into what performed best and least well, but it therefore says nothing about SEO performance as a whole. This analysis is too simple for that, because it deliberately does not take other factors into account.
Bringing SEO and Ads together
You now have the Ads-CPC and the SEO-CPC, and you can see the differences within each channel, but you can also compare the channels. How does a URL perform in both SEO and Ads?
The most interesting thing is to look at the biggest deviations in both channels. These are the ‘ugly ducklings’ in terms of Ads and SEO CPCs. They probably immediately offer an opportunity to support them with the other channel, because the costs relative to the number of visitors are relatively high, making it realistic that you can achieve a higher return through the other channel. What this creates is budget shifting within the channel and possibly also between the channels. It can also affect your seasonal approach.
If the analysis shows that the costs of achieving good positioning for post-season products are higher than expected and the return is lower, while at the same time you see that the SEO-CPC for the pre-season and orientation phase is relatively low, it makes sense to shift the focus of SEO to the pre-season and orientation phase.
At the same time, it is advisable to scale up advertising during the post-season if its costs are significantly lower than the SEO-CPC. This allows you to generate a higher return with Ads compared with SEO for the category in question.
At Aspen Digital, the focus is on creating visibility in the search engine for relevant website traffic. Search engine marketing is the most profitable option for your business. Data and our internally developed tooling support this growth process, enabling us to make well-informed choices based on your product offering/service, focused on your profitability.
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